The Perseids and Other Stories (12 page)

I took the Queen car east. The scrap of paper on which Deirdre had written Carver’s address was in my pocket, more out than in, really, since I felt compelled to check it and check it again as the streetcar stuttered past the racetrack, the waterworks. The numbers were elusive.

The address was well off the transit routes. What I found when I approached on foot was an ordinary Beaches neighborhood, snow-silent and still. The houses were fashionable restored freeholds above the frozen lakeshore, a few lights still burning in second- and third-story bedroom windows. Carver’s was no different. I wondered whether he owned it or rented it, whether money had ever been a problem for him. I doubted it.

And now what: Should I knock on the door and demand to see Michelle? What if she wasn’t there? What if Deirdre and I had drawn all the wrong conclusions? I stood in the snow feeling useless and foolish.

Then—I presume not coincidentally—Carver’s door opened, and I stepped behind a snowbound hedge as he came smiling into the night with Michelle on his arm.

She wore her navy winter coat with the collar turned up. She looked cold and bewildered, both very young and very old. Carver wore jeans and a flannel shirt, and the snow seemed not to touch him.

I blinked, and they were at the end of the block.

I called Michelle’s name. She didn’t look back—only inclined her head as if an errant thought had troubled her.

There was nothing to do but follow them.

He turned corners I had never seen before. Narrow alleys, a corridor of trees in an empty park, a wood-paved ravine walk dense with swirling snow.

I ran, they strolled, but the gap between us widened until Michelle was a distant figure, vague among the snow-spirals, and Carver—

John Carver, I believe, began to grow translucent, not-quite-invisible, became a gap in the falling snow that might have been a human shape or something taller, more agile, sleek, potent, pleased.

At last he turned and looked directly at me. I felt but couldn’t see his smile. His eyes, even at this distance, were distinctly yellow.

He folded his arm around Michelle as if claiming a trophy and turned a corner I have never been able to find.

I suppose it had been a sort of contest all along.

That was the last I saw of her.

The invisible city seals its exits. Enter once and walk away. Enter twice and the way back to the world is more elusive.

Enter a third time—

I walked for hours—it might have been days—but every road turned back to those elliptical streets and jigsaw alleys.

Only a few of us live in the secret city, and we seldom speak. Things work differently here. It is, I think, a sort of mirror world, an empty and imperfect shell of a city, sparsely colonized.

Its shabbily furnished upper rooms are mainly empty. I live in one now. I sleep on its crude spring mattress and I gaze through its grime-crusted windows and I breathe its dry and dust-heavy air. I eat what I find in unattended stores. Canned food without labels. The stock is periodically replenished. I don’t know how.

Something in the hidden city inhibits curiosity, and memory….

Memory fades into the air like morning fog.

I write to remember. I write in these lined tablets of cheap pulp paper manufactured in Taiwan or Indonesia, places incomprehensibly far away.

I think I’m not the only one. I think there are others scribing their thin and thinning memoirs, diary entries that grow more stark with every passing day, letters to lovers whose names we have forgotten.

Spring now. The wind is cold, wet, cutting.

I do not despair of finding a way home. Just yesterday I thought I saw Deirdre in the street, looking for me, perhaps; but if she’s found the hidden city, she needs to be warned.

I called her name, but she vanished.

If you find this, will you warn her?

And if you know Michelle, if you see Michelle, please give her these pages.

I mail the pages from my window. I mail them on the wind. As yesterday. As the day before. On a good day the wind carries the yellow leaves of paper up above the stone capitals and pebbled roofs, above the tarpaper and the wind vanes and the chimneys of the city, and I hope and believe that for the wind there are no borders. The wind, I think, is wholly invisible and utterly free.

I’ve never told anyone this story. I wouldn’t be telling it now, I suppose, except that—they’re back.

They’re back, after almost fifty years, and although I don’t know what that means, I suspect it means I ought to find a voice. Find an audience.

They won’t confirm or deny, of course. They are, as ever, enigmatic. They do not speak. They only watch.

I was fourteen years old when my father decided to send me to spend the summer of 1953 with my uncle, Carter Lansing, an astronomer at the then-new and marvelous Mt. Palomar Observatory in California.

The visit was billed as therapy, which I suppose is why Carter agreed to suffer the company of a nervous teenage girl for two consecutive months. The prospect, for me, was both exhilarating and intimidating.

Exhilarating because—well, it must be hard to imagine what plush iconography was contained in that word, “California,” at the dawn of the 1950s. I was a Toronto girl in the age of Toronto the Good; I had passed a childhood in chilly cinderblock schools where the King’ (and lately the young Queen’s) portrait gazed stonily from every wall, in the age of Orange parades and war privation and the solemn politics of nation-building. I knew the names of Wilfred Laurier and Louis Riel. My idea of a beach was the gray pebbled lakeshore at Sunnyside. Oatmeal breakfasts and snowsuits:
that
Toronto.

California, I understood, was somewhere between New York City and Xanadu. I had seen its picture, in
Life
or at the movies. Blue Kodak seashores, breezy palmettos, Spanish missions with terra-cotta tiles; William Randolph Hearst bathing with movie stars in Venetian mosaic pools.

It was intimidating for much the same reason. I had trouble imagining my awkward and pasty-white body tucked into its one-piece bathing suit and salmon-pink rubber cap for a frolic on the sands of Malibu. Surely everyone would laugh?

And intimidating because of my uncle Carter, the family celebrity. The smart brother, my father called him. Carter had attended MIT on a scholarship. Carter had been tutored by the famous, had excelled, had been groomed for his ascension into the elite of the astronomical community. His picture had been in
Time
magazine, smiling, handsome, the opposite of the neurasthenic cartoon “scientist,” a young and vital genius. He knew Igor Stravinsky; he knew the Huxleys.

Whereas my father managed a branch-plant greeting card business entombed in a Leaside industrial park.

So there was the daunting possibility that Carter had agreed to take me as an act of noblesse oblige: some restorative Altadina air for a crazy Canadian niece. For the girl who sees monsters. The girl who floats through walls.

He met me at the airport, unmistakable in his leather flying jacket and sunglasses. We said hello, and that was about all we said during the long ride that followed, apart from a brief session of how-are-you, how’s-the-family. I was dazed by the overnight flight but fascinated by the passing landscape. California was much browner than I expected, much drier and dustier, more provisional, like something under construction. The earthmovers and oil wells outnumbered the palms.

At least until we climbed into the hills where Carter lived. Here the houses were painted in pastel colors, the lawns immaculate and gleaming. Automatic sprinklers gushed rainbows into the vertical sunshine. Dwarf palms shaded cool, arched doorways. We parked at last, and Carter carried my luggage into his
house, which was clean-smelling and carpeted and quiet as some ancient arboretum.

“This is your room,” he said, dropping my suitcases. It was a small room, spare, the bed merely functional, but a palace as far as I was concerned. The window looked out on the garden; the heads of bird-of-paradise poked over the sill, Picasso birds with a dab of sap for an eye. The air smelled warm and somehow safe, somehow forgiving.

I asked, “Does the window lock?”

Carter’s smile faded abruptly. “It locks,” he said, “but you might want to leave it open a crack these summer nights. There’s jasmine in the garden. Smells good.”

“But it locks—the window
does
lock.”

He sighed. “Yes, Sandra, it locks.”

I thought at first they couldn’t find me, that I had evaded them.

“Them.”
They
or
them
—I had no other words. We didn’t talk about “the grays” in those days, as we do now, when every encounter is shoehorned into the typology of the standard abduction scenario. I had no name for them, for the same reason children in those times referred to their genitals as “thing” or “down there.” Code words for the unspeakable.

Because events happened to me that were impossible, and because I described these events in great detail, I had been taken to doctors, who called me “nervous and imaginative” and wrote referrals. So I’d learned the painful equation. Talk + diagnosis = punishment. I was tired of my mother taking the blame. (My mother died when I was ten years old, and I was supposed to resent her for dying, but I didn’t; I only missed her.) I was tired of my father’s obstinate, stony disbelief, his dutiful mustering of a sympathy he clearly didn’t feel.

And I was tired of the nights, the fear. Let California wash all that away, I thought. Smother it with eucalyptus musk and bury it in cypress shade. Take me a few degrees closer to the warm equator. Show me some southern stars. Let me look into the sky at night and not be afraid.

Days passed. I was alone more often than not, but never
lonely. The sunshine was blissfully exhausting. And sleep was sweet, at least for a while.

“I’m having some friends over,” my uncle announced.

Late July. We had fallen into a fixed routine that suited us both, Carter and I. We ate dinner each night at eight, an impeccable meal prepared by Evangeline, Carter’s housekeeper. Tonight was no exception. In the last weeks I had seen more of Evangeline than of my uncle. Evangeline was a large black woman with a personal dignity as imposing as her waistline. I thought she liked me more than she liked Carter, but Evangeline’s true feelings were hard to divine.

She put a bowl of peas on the table, gave me an inscrutable look, turned back to the kitchen. Carter wore his making-conversation-with-Sandra expression, as if he wanted credit for his fabulous patience.

“That sounds nice,” I ventured.

“The thing is, Sandra, it’s more or less an adults-only affair.”

I wasn’t especially disappointed. I had figured out how it was with Carter Lansing. He didn’t dislike me, but he had no common ground with a teenage girl. Nor did he care to develop any. When I was forced to beg a ride to the drugstore to buy sanitary pads, he had turned chalk-white and treated me like an invalid.

(Years later I would learn that my uncle was gay and that my visit had doubtless put a crimp in his social life, and that everyone knew this fact about him save myself. Had I known, I might have understood. Or perhaps not: I was in some ways exactly as conventional as he expected me to be.)

A gathering of Carter’s adult friends. How tedious, I thought. “I’ll lock myself in my room. Listen to the radio.”

“No need to lock yourself in anywhere, Sandra. I’mjust afraid you’ll be bored. It’s a pretty stuffy group, actually.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

He was completely wrong.

In the morning I wrote in my pocket diary:

Another night. No sign of THEM. Am I FREE AT LAST?

Don’t be misled. I
admired
my uncle. I envied his work.

I had read about the observatory on Mt. Palomar; I knew more about it than I admitted to Carter. (Sensing that this aloof god would not appreciate my worship.)

The Hale Observatory was new, the freshest and finest outpost on the frontier of human knowledge. It housed the first 200-inch telescope, the Big Eye, a monument to contemporary technology. Designed and built at Cal Tech, it had been wheeled up the mountain—insured for six hundred thousand dollars by Lloyds of London—in 1947, just six years ago, and it was formally dedicated to George Ellery Hale in 1948. At the dedication ceremony, a Cal Tech trustee had read
“Benedicite, Omnia Opera Domini”
from the Book of Common Prayer, and it must have seemed appropriate: the telescope would look deeper into the heavens than anything before it, some five hundred million light-years deeper.